Doc Searls Weblog

Customer Commons has taken on the job of opening a true blue ocean: a vast, uncontested market space where customers are free and respected for what they bring to business as independent participants working at full agency.

Specifically, free customers—

1. Bring good information and not just good money.
2. Bring genuine and not coerced loyalty.
3. Converse with and relate to businesses as human beings and not just as seats, eyeballs, end users, or consumers.*
4. Require privacy for all the above, and are equal partners with the businesses in which they invest trust, opening paths for market intelligence to flow both ways.
5. Prove more valuable than the captive kind. Those are the ones old-school marketing likes to shove into captivity through a funnel.

A Free Customer Award would be fun for Customer Commons to give to businesses that welcome and eagerly engage with free customers. As a base requirement, these businesses would agree to customers’ MyTerms.

Here are some candidates (links go to PageXrays of each):

• DuckDuckGo
• Trader Joes
• Kagi
• Proton
• Signal
• In-and-Out Burger

Name some others.

I would exclude Apple. While Apple is more respectful of personal privacy than Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other giant silo operators, it still participates in the surveillance fecosystem through its IDFA (ID For Advertisers) device identifier. That’s there for advertisers, not for you (unless you really want advertising personalized by tracking, which some apparently do). Nearly everybody opts out of it, and I think they should kill it. Bonus thought: Change “Ask App Not to Track” to “Prevent App From Tracking.” (Some background on that.)

Of course, it’s too early for this, because we need code to make MyTerms work. We’ll be seeing some soon at VRM Day, IIW, and AIW, which run consecutively through the final weekdays of this month and the first of next (April 27 to May 1). Casting the net of possibilities wider, I’m hoping (and in some cases, eventually expecting) code from:

• Privacy-oriented browser makers
  • DuckDuckGo
  • Brave
  • Mozilla/Firefox
  • Vivaldi
• Open source Web server developers
  • WordPress
  • Drupal
• JLINC
• DataPal
• Inrupt/Solid
• Kwaai
• First Person Project
• PersonaAI model/system suppliers such as Ollama, LM Studio, and PrivateGPT
• Trust Over IP (ToIP) and its working groups
• Members of the Open Wallet Foundation (OWF), such as—
  • Affinidi & Glenn Gore
  • Fynbos & Adrian Hope-Bailie
  • Futurewei & Wenjing Chu
  • Trust Spanning Protocol (TSP), with Wenjing Chu and Sam Smith
  • Credo (née Hyperledger Aries Framework JS
  • OpenID Foundation and its Digital Credentials Protocols working group
  • AIPREF (AI Preferences) and its working group
• Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF)
• Ayra and its ambassadors
• Agent control tower developers, such as ServiceNow and Credo AI
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Experience (CX) companies ready to come over from the old red ocean and start shakng hands with Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) on the customers’ side. For more on that new space, read Nitin Badjatia and Iain Henderson.
• Consent Management Platforms that want to get out of the icky old cookie notice business.

Tell me what (and whom) I am missing on any of those lists.

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*See the “one clue” in The Cluetrain Manifesto, which was posted in 1999.